


Two of Winter

by Poetry



Category: Campaign (Podcast): Skyjacks
Genre: Background Travis/Forest Queen, Backstory, Banter, Canon Compliant, Emotionally Repressed, Episode Tag, Huddling For Warmth, Illimat, Non-Explicit Sex, Other, POV First Person, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:55:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27893422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: Needless to say, neither of them shall speak of this incident ever again.
Relationships: Gable/Travis Matagot
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Two of Winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Culumacilinte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/gifts).



> **me, listening to the ice prison escape scene in episode 46:** it's free Canadian shack fic real estate
> 
> Happy Yuletide, Cully! I was new to this fandom when I offered it in my sign-up, and as I listened to more and more of it, I came to ship these two just as much as you did in your request. Thanks to starbit for beta-reading. Content warnings are in the endnotes.

After I broke myself and Gable out of prison, I made a break for one of the guards’ dogsled carriages. I used another key on my stolen ring to open it. Gable folded themself in and lit the coal engine in the back. I bounded up to the lead dog yoked to the sled. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, stared into his eyes, and said, “You’re going to listen to me if you know what’s good for you.”

He looked down and lowered his ears. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. I know what it’s like to be a dog.”

I flung myself in the carriage next to Gable. It was starting to float off the melting snow as the coal engine activated the feather-weave roof. And as an added bonus, for the first time in months, I was starting to feel warm. I grabbed the dogs’ reins, flicked them, and shouted, “Mush!”

With the carriage floating on a cushion of air, the dogs pulled us across the snow almost effortlessly. Of course, another set of guards in another carriage could also play that game. Gable opened the carriage door on their side, letting in a fierce swirling snowy wind. They produced a gun from their prison rags and fired back at the pursuing carriage. There was a human scream and confused whimpers from the dogs. Gable slammed the door of the carriage shut again.

“Stole that from the guards, huh?” I panted. The feeling was tingling back to my toes and the tip of my nose. “Wow, you got your self-preservation instincts back real fast once you got a reminder. You’re welcome.”

Gable looked back over their shoulder at the prison camp. “No one else after us. Guess they figure we’ll die of exposure.”

“Let’s not die of exposure, then,” I said. I was even feeling pretty optimistic about that until the sun started to go down. Gable took over the reins while the transformation chewed me up and spat me out. It was cold as hell down here, and it wasn’t even winter. Good thing, too, because this far south the winter nights were so long that I’d have had to spend almost all my time as a rabbit. At the end of the change, I was in my autumn shape, and the temperature seemed to drop by the minute.

Gable had found sacks of dried meat at the back of the carriage. They were letting the fire simmer down in the coal grate, and had whistled the dogs over for food. The carriage sank slowly into the snow as the feather-weave cooled. When I gazed pitifully at the jerky, Gable tore off a piece the size of my beak and said, “This is for you. The rest is for the dogs. They’re doing all the work around here.”

“Hey,” I said. “I was holding the reins. Doesn’t that mean I get to decide who gets the food?”

“No,” said Gable flatly. “That makes you the helmsman. I’m the quartermaster.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go on and take all the meat for yourself, then, greedy guts.” But Gable ate a piece barely any bigger than the piece they’d given me, and gave out more to the dogs.

By the time the dogs were fed, it was dark and bitter cold. I pressed myself against the banked fire of the coal engine. I squawked in indignation when Gable wrapped themself around the coal engine, squishing me between their cold chest and the warm metal. “You’re crushing me! I have hollow bones, you can’t just squish me with your giant body!”

“You could try sleeping with the dogs,” Gable said. “They could use an extra snack.”

The situation got significantly more bearable as the fire warmed Gable up. I relaxed. “Never mind, this is nice. Could you get my wings? I got coal dust on them.”

Gable sighed, folded in their arms, and ran their fingers through my wing feathers. As my mind drifted, warm and sleepy, I went back to the moment when Gable told me what they were. It made sense, what with their general weirdness and the big nasty wounds on their back. But the important question was what it meant for me. Angels are scary, and Gable didn’t like me. On the bright side, Gable might be one of the few beings on Speir capable of killing me. I’d have to keep that in mind for whenever I got tired of the whole mystic curse immortality thing. “I keep picturing you with wings like mine,” I said. “Big white wings.”

They snorted. “Bigger than yours. They’d look tiny on my back.” Their fingers ran between my primaries. “I don’t know what color my wings were. I don’t remember anything.”

I buried my face in the rough cloth of their prison uniform. “I bet they were yellow. Like piss.” Somehow, I managed to fall asleep like that.

I woke up shaking. I screamed into Gable’s chest as my bones dissolved. There are a lot of reasons why I don’t share my bed with anyone, but this is the biggie. No one likes to wake up to the sound of their bed partner’s organs melting. But Gable didn’t move away. They kept me pinned against the warmth of the coal engine the whole time, watching me. At the end, I leaned my forehead against their chest and caught my breath.

Gable’s chest isn’t flat, but they have so much solid pectoral muscle that their tits don’t exactly make a comfy pillow. Still, squished between them at my front and the warm coal engine at my back, I was much more comfortable than I had been at any point in my stay at Hotel Icy Death Camp. So cozy, in fact, that my dick had decided to wake up from a months-long vacation from any exciting activities.

Bad timing. It was such bad timing. How did angels react to morning wood in their immediate vicinity? Did they smite you for the sin of being erect at them? One way or another, I was about to find out. I went still and lowered my eyes. If I’d had long ears, I would have lowered them too. Sometimes I hate knowing what it’s like to be a dog.

But instead of smiting me, Gable held the side of my neck and cheek in their big meaty hand and rocked forward. I gasped and squeaked, which was not my smoothest sex move ever, though in my defense, I’d had no idea that sex was going to happen until a tenth of a second before. But just as quickly as the sex had started, it stopped. Gable’s brain seemed to have caught up with what their body was doing, and they froze, eyes wide.

Well, that just wouldn’t do. All I wanted in that moment was to feel something nice for the first time in months, and Gable was going to let their moral qualms and/or general loathing of me get in the way of that. Why should it? I, too, hated Gable and had serious moral objections to hooking up with stupid annoying idiots, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from getting some much-needed release.

I fished around for the magic words that would help Gable get back to the sex. “You’re thanking me,” I tried. “For saving you.”

Gable’s brows drew together. That was progress. Annoyance was so much better than wide-eyed panic. “I am _not_ thanking you,” they hissed. “I will never, _ever_ thank you.” Which was not exactly promising, but then they pressed me into the side of the coal engine. “I am paying you back for saving me. So the next time you turn up like a bad penny, I don’t want to hear you saying ‘waah, Gable, you owe me!’” they said, putting on a voice for me that was, in my opinion, hurtful. I was about to make my opinion known when Gable said something that brought the entire universe to a screeching halt.

“So how do you want to be fucked?”

Nobody had ever asked me that before. For an immortal, I haven’t had all that much sex, since I’m an animal during the time that most people get it on. The times I have managed some afternoon delight, things just kind of developed organically without anyone asking for specifics. But Gable looked at me with big serious eyes, waiting for my answer. It wasn’t a joke or a trick. It was just Gable and their big powerful body, ready to use it in whatever way I asked.

Too much power. Too much responsibility. And whenever I have too much responsibility, I find a way to offload it somewhere else. I pulled my leg up, took off my left shoe, and reached inside.

“Excuse me, am I _boring you_?” Gable said. They squinted. “Is this because of what I said? I don’t have to fuck you. There are plenty of options.”

As I got out the Illimat deck, I fumbled it, and a card fluttered to the ground. It was the Two of Winter. “Oh, very funny,” I told the deck. “I bet you think you’re clever.”

Gable stared. “Where did you get that?”

“What’s the point of stealing keys from a prison guard if you can’t steal some fun stuff too?” I picked up the Two of Winter and separated out luminaries from the deck. I fanned them out and presented them to Gable.

They squinted at the cards. “Are you seriously letting a card decide what kind of sex you have? What if you draw The Island?”

“Then I’ll take the advice that this was a really stupid idea. Come on, pick one.” I waved the cards at them.

They took a card, grimaced, and made to put it back. I snatched the rest of the cards away. “No takebacks. Give it up.”

Gable showed me the card. It was the Forest Queen. They insisted, “We can just forget it.”

I looked at the card. It was a better likeness of the Queen than most cards. Maybe the artist had even seen her once. She had the rectangular pupils of a goat, and her hair reared up around her head like striking snakes. She looked like that sometimes, when she was in a good mood. I reached out and touched the sharp slash of her cheekbone with my fingertip. “It’s okay. We can work with this.”

Gable looked down at the card, blinked, and looked back at me. “Did you ever. Um.”

“Oh, no. But I did see her, once.”

“You _what_?”

I rolled my eyes. “Cool your engines, I wasn’t a Peeping Tom or anything. It was in public. A clearing in the woods with platforms and rope bridges in the trees all around. She wanted everyone to see.” I traced the curving line of one of the snakes rising from her head. “It was sunset. All of us changelings in her forest were starting to make the shift. She passed by a man turning into a deer, and froze him. The transformation just — stopped. He had fur growing along his left side like moss, from his calf up to his cheek. His eyes were those big soft brown eyes that deer have. She stopped and said, ‘oh, you _are_ beautiful like this.’ You could see how much pain he was in, with his transformation held halfway. But he couldn’t stop looking at her with those deer eyes in his human face. I missed some of it because my own shift was hitting me hard. When I came to, I was a coyote. She was straddling him on the ground. I could smell how much she scared him, and how much she turned him on.” I looked up from the card and blinked. “Oh. Did I just say all of that out loud?” It wasn’t fair. I wasn’t even drunk.

Gable smiled. “You did. No takebacks.” They slid the Forest Queen back into the deck, and dropped the deck back in my shoe. Then they pounced. They got me on my back, arms pinned over my head, their forearm a solid bar across my wrists. With their other hand, they roughly pulled down my sackcloth prison uniform, exposing my bare ass to the cold floor of the carriage. The bunched-up uniform bound my knees together. I shivered and shook in Gable’s grip and tried to summon up a cocky grin. Did I look to them the way they’d looked to me on the day they washed up on the beach?

Gable studied me. It wasn’t the way I’d looked at them that day on the beach. They weren’t looking for cash. They were looking for something else, but I didn’t know what. Still looking at me, they plunged two of their fingers into their mouth. They lapped up and down their fingers with the flat of their tongue, like a cat cleaning itself, with no attempt at seduction. It was hot anyway. When they pulled their fingers away from their mouth, a trail of spit connected their glistening fingertips to their lips for a moment before it broke. “Okay,” they said, a little hoarsely. “You want to get fucked like the Forest Queen? I think I can work with that.”

They didn’t fuck me like the Forest Queen. Not really. They were too kind for that. When I hissed and grimaced from the icy burn of the cold carriage floor on my ass, they flipped me face down over their lap and fucked me that way, holding me up with a hand under my neck so my cheek didn’t touch the floor. When their fingers got too dry, they pulled out and spat on them to wet them again, before I even thought to complain. When the sled dogs started howling, they called out, “Oh, hush. You’ll get your food in a minute.”

When I came, I went limp and sleepy on Gable’s lap. They pulled me roughly by the hair so my head rested on their knee instead of the floor. I heard them spit again, a rustle of rough fabric, and fast slick movements. With effort, I turned my head to look. They had one hand gripped in my hair and the other down the front of their prison uniform, the wrist flexing.

“You don’t have to hide it,” I mumbled. “I know what your weird junk looks like. You were naked when I found you, remember?” Gable’s junk looks like a statue of genitals left out in the wind and sand for a thousand years to erode. Just two smooth vertical ridges and a bump at the top, with no way to tell whether they’d once been balls and a dick, a cunt and a clit, or something in between.

Gable’s hand slowed. “I just don’t want to freeze my ass off like you. What, do you want another look at the freak show?”

“If you think you have the weirdest crotch in town, then you didn’t have _remotely_ enough fun when you visited the Queen’s Forest. But fine, keep your pants on.” I watched them, waiting for them to continue.

“Stop _looking_ ,” Gable complained.

“I showed you mine,” I huffed, but I turned to bury my face in the crook of their knee, where there was a small pocket of warmth. I could still hear them, though. Their breath panted harsher and faster. Their giant thigh muscle tensed against my cheek, then went slack.

They got up suddenly, tumbling me to the floor. I yelped and pulled my uniform pants back up. They loaded coal for the engine. I got my shoes back on, Illimat deck and all, and scrambled for the driver seat. We had a long way left to go.

When Gable settled in the passenger seat next to mine, they had a small piece of jerky for me. They were being too nice, and it was making me itch. I should have been the one pitying them, if I were the pitying type. They had been in that icy hell for _eight years._ It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to be big and strong and rude, so I could insult them and steal their stuff. If they kept _this_ up, whatever this was, I might have to trust them and treat them like a friend.

At midday, we saw the smoke from a small village. People were fishing through holes drilled through the ice. I pulled on the reins to get the dogs to start slowing down. “Looks like my stop,” I said.

“Very funny,” Gable said. “You know, if you want a break, you can just ask.”

I kept pulling the reins. “Not a joke. I’m getting out here.”

Gable looked bewildered. “You can’t make it out here. That village is tiny. There’s hardly anyone for you to scam.”

The carriage came to a stop not far from one of the ice fishing holes. The fisherwoman looked up in surprise. “There’s got to be _somebody_ ,” I said, stepping down from the carriage. My shoes were thin enough that I could feel the cold burn of the snow. “I’m going to find that sucker, and I’m going to scam them.”

“More like they’ll take pity on you and feed you soup like a lost little baby,” Gable said, moving sideways into the driver seat. “Which isn’t what you want at all, of course. To be taken care of. You’re just a coldhearted scammer.” They flicked the reins and started the dogs going again.

I turned toward the village. It’s so much easier to scam a stranger than someone who knows you that well.

**Author's Note:**

>  **CW** : there is mildly dubious consent between Travis and Gable, in that Gable initiates sex while Travis is kind of sleepy and unprepared (though they then stop and check in.) There is also some dubious consent in a flashback to The Forest Queen, in which she is somewhat sexually aggressive with another changeling.


End file.
